Coach Coach

Clubbed Thumb Summerworks

2024

Written by Bailey Williams

Directed by Sarah Blush

Featuring: Purva Bedi, Cindy Cheung, Becca Lish, Kelly McAndrew, Susannah Millonzi and Zuzanna Szadkowski

Set by Colleen Murray
Costumes by Dan Wang
Lights by Masha Tsimring

Sound by Johnny Gasper
Fight choreography by Kelly Bartnik
Stage Manager: Allison Raynes

A group of coaches – with the same credentials, but different specialties – gather for a weekend retreat. Some of them will leave as Platinum Practitioner Life Coaches with Dr. Meredith Martin’s Action Coach Academy for Thinking Coaches. Some of them will not.

Blush and her actors are clearly having a blast generating the erotic currents that whiz around the stage like bolts from fly zappers"

-Sara Holdren, Vulture

"Deliriously funny"

Juan A. Ramirez, Vogue

Campy but deadly serious, darkly funny over roiling depths, Coach Coach...cannonballs into its genre mashup: melodrama meets farce meets murder mystery meets soap opera meets The Women meets The Real Inspector Hound with just a dash of horror, all adding up to something stranger, more resonant, and more unsettling than all of the above. Every time Williams and director Sarah Blush seem to be settling in to one set of dramaturgical expectations, another element gets added to the mix. It’s a complex and sure-handed juggling act that’s also an elaborate piece of misdirection, because all of the stylistic riffs and plot twists are really more like bread crumbs, leading us deeper into the piece’s darker insights into twenty-first-century selfhood.

-Loren Noveck, Exeunt

[Williams] urges production teams to “consider the fundamental tensions of camp,” which, says Susan Sontag, “sees everything in quotation marks.” Director Sarah Blush and her excellent six-woman ensemble have taken note...Coach Coach remains a delicious showcase for their all-out commitment to every gasp-inducing revelation, ominous leer, and sudden but inevitable betrayal.

-Sara Holdren, Vulture

TV:

Abby Glusker, UTA